Purity comes at a cost. Along with "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly", the knowledge that "God sees everywhere", is a snippet of Protestant wo

Purity comes at a cost. Along with "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly", the knowledge that "God sees everywhere", is a snippet of Protestant work-lore from my childhood. Why clean the above the shelf where nobody can see? God can see it. Why paint behind the radiator? God knows if you didn't. Despite inevitable teenage atheism, minor deities, duly internalised as persecutory consciences, still followed me around inspecting various pieces of work. While never actually obsessive, it took me another decade to shake-off the orderliness that might keep me awake worrying if cables were not properly coiled, or wondering what happened to that one missing screw after reassembling something. Mostly recovered, I embrace the chaos these days. When fussing about a job I can call it "diligence". The downside is that it tends to slow you down. Never really held down a straight "coding" job for long, because writing programs that work even if God turned up to check the source code and run some unit tests is a tall order. Like the OP, for me it's enjoyable hand crafting little things to solve problems. Minimalism, elegance and neatness is a matter of pride. And like the OP, my inner code fascist feels a sense of disgust at ugly, wasteful machine generated goo that spews forth in every modern project. Opening any modern web page is like triggering a spring loaded jack-in-a-box filled with rotting entrails as some cruel practical joke.